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A classic conspiracy theory is being discussed on social media this week, after Twitter user Rod Mason asked his followers how lunar landers returned astronauts to Earth. ⓘ IFLScience is not responsible for content shared from external sites. Advertisement Of course, people were quick to call the question stupid, or question why Mason posted it to […]

Benjamin Franklin helped America break free of the British currency system by designing paper money that was hard to fake. Some of his techniques have been lost in time, and only now been reconstructed using 21st-century analytic technologies. After the little things like explaining gravity and the rainbow, Isaac Newton spent the second half of his […]

A recent study has shed light on a potentially overlooked consequence of climate change: the increased risk of being bitten by a venomous snake. Looking at reports of hospitalizations in Georgia, USA, the team found evidence of an increase in snake-related envenomation in relation to a rise in average daily temperature. With the World Health […]

Earwax might look gross, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad for you, in fact, it carries out an important role in the delicate ear canal. Unfortunately, it’s become the norm to wage war against earwax and many people are unknowingly making their ear health worse by over-cleaning with unsafe tools.  Put the cotton bud down […]

Ahead of the release of Christopher Nolan’s long-awaited Oppenheimer (and Lin Manuel-Miranda’s even more anticipated Hip Hoppenheimer) this week there has been a renewed interest in its central character, the real-life J. Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer was the theoretical physicist often referred to as the “father of the atomic bomb” for his work as director of the […]

General Relativity predicts that wormholes could connect two distant parts of the universe in a way that could be traversed instantaneously, or nearly so. Given that Special Relativity had previously demonstrated that traveling faster than light would be the equivalent of traveling in time, this raises the question of whether wormholes could also allow us […]

It’s a commonly held belief that the best place to discover new species is your own backyard. While this newly discovered species of millipede doesn’t quite cut it, being discovered in a park on the outskirts of Los Angeles is pretty impressive given the suburban surroundings.  It was first spotted in April 2018 by two […]

Anticyclones are, as the word implies, the opposite of a cyclone. Where a cyclone brings stormy weather and fast winds, anticyclones are high-pressure zones where winds move more sluggishly. For these reasons, they are associated with sunny, warm weather. But they can easily become heat traps. The high pressure pushes air down, which warms as […]

Wildlife experts have stopped an autopsy on a washed-up whale in Baile Uí Chuill Strand, Ballinskelligs, Ireland, out of fears it might explode.  The dead 18.9-meter (62-foot) fin whale washed up on the beach earlier this month. Experts from the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group (IWDG) examined the whale, and determined it probably died a […]

We’re entering an era of change in Alzheimer’s disease diagnosis, with the announcement of a new set of diagnostic guidelines for the disease. It’s hoped that a greater emphasis on blood biomarkers could help more patients be diagnosed earlier, and reduce the need for more invasive and expensive tests. The new criteria have been developed […]

In 1954, the Daily Mail sponsored a team of journalists and mountaineers to search the Himalayas for the elusive and very real (so they believed) Abominable Snowman. The whole venture was a failure that cost the newspaper the equivalent of £1 million in today’s money, but it also demonstrates the excitement that surrounded this supposed […]

You have probably heard of the Fermi Paradox, but if you haven’t, here it is in a nutshell: Given the high probability that alien life exists out there in the universe (bearing in mind the vastness of space and that we keep finding planets within habitable zones) why has nobody got in touch yet? If […]

If you’ve ever had a look through your relatives’ old photo albums from when they were young, or watched old TV shows, this thought may have crossed your mind: why the hell do these teenagers look like they’re worried about mortgages and pensions on their way to their bi-annual prostate exams? While some of it […]

There’s an old adage that we know more about space than we do about the depths of the ocean, as if it’s not rational to see what lurks down there and immediately want to leave the planet. The ocean is incredibly deep, with an average depth of 3.7 kilometers (2.3 miles). The deepest part of […]

A battle of cetaceans plays out beneath the Arctic sea ice where orcas pursue belugas. Orcas, known as killer whales, are ferocious predators, but the flukes on their backs can sometimes get in the way. While the orb-like beluga can slip beneath the sea ice and hide out in narrow air holes, orcas run the […]

The modern world is one of nation-states strictly defined by borders. Challenge those borders and it’s a sure-fire way to have troops and tanks rolling in your direction before lunchtime. However, despite humanity’s relatively recent obsession with lines on a map, there are a small number of places on Earth that no sovereign state claims […]

In the rocky hills of Central Asia, a number of walls bear a mysterious script that’s scrawled in an unknown written language. Thanks to the recent work of a team from the University of Cologne, parts of this ancient script are starting to be revealed, shedding light onto the pre-eminent culture that wrote it.  The […]

Psychedelic psychotherapy is currently experiencing its second wave of interest, with studies over the past decade revealing the therapeutic potential of psilocybin and other mind-altering substances. A previous boom in psychedelic research occurred between the 1950s and 1970s, when a lack of ethical standards allowed for some shockingly irresponsible experiments to be performed on nonconsenting […]

We’ve had just about as much as we can take of animals being deceptively, and sometimes deviously, smart this week. First, magpies demonstrated their lawlessness by building nests with material meant to deter them – now it turns out llamas, too, are sharper than you might imagine.  The canny camelids (not to be confused with […]